Tag: turn off indexing

The Search Indexing service in Windows XP scans through all of the files of your system and stores data regarding them in specialized index files so that your search function becomes faster. This indexing process is carried out as a background. For those people who use older generation machines this can be a burden on the PC as the memory in those machines is small and comes at a premium.

Hence, you can speed up your computers working speed if you could disable your search indexing that is running in the background. In XP, it is possible to do this – you can turn off the indexing of hard disk drives (HDD) selectively or you can even deactivate the indexing entirely for the system. This is what you have to do:

2. Select the particular hard drive for which you want to turn off the indexing and right-click on it..

3. Select the Properties tab on the context menu that comes up.

4. Click on the General option.

5. Deselect the box adjacent to Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching.

6. Click OK. [After this, you will have to wait for some time as removal of the indexing process takes a while to complete.]

7. You can carry out the steps 1-6 for any number of drives in which you want to disable indexing of files.

Steps to disable the file indexing service entirely in XP

1. Got to “Administrator Tools” in the “Control Panel”, and open the Services program. Or, you can also open the Run prompt from the Start menu, following which you must enter services.msc at the Run prompt.

2. Locate the Indexing Service tab by scrolling down the menu, and double-click.

3. The current service status is probably showing “Running”. Click on the “Stop” button to stop indexing services entirely.

4. Go to “Startup Type”, and select Disabled. This will ensure that the service does not start up again.